Today, a mobile user's data session is anchored on a mobile gateway such as a (GGSN, PGW) working as part of a mobile packet core. Anchoring the mobile data session on the mobile gateway includes anchoring both control and data traffic flows between the user's device and the mobile gateway. Control traffic is exchanged between the user's device and the gateway, and then terminated on the gateway. In an uplink direction, the data traffic is decapsulated from a mobile encapsulation protocol and presented on a Gi interface as Internet Protocol (IP) packets. The data traffic is then often sent either to a service provider private network to deliver services or service provider private content, or is sent to the Internet for content delivery. The mobile gateway terminates tunnel encapsulation specific to the mobile network and presents IP traffic on its Internet facing interface. The mobile gateway is also responsible to applying various services to the data stream based on a user profile. Examples of such services include quality of service (QoS), deep packet inspection, traffic management, lawful intercept, http header enrichment as well as billing the data stream sent to and/or from the user. These services are applied in the mobile packet core, and mobile operators typically have a complete infrastructure to provide these services to the mobile user based on their profile. All of the data traffic between the user equipment and its termination point in both the uplink and downlink directions passes via the mobile gateway.
In selected scenarios it is desirable to terminate the mobile data path locally in the radio access network (RAN) or the transport. This is called the local termination point. A goal of the local data path termination is the need to serve local content or to apply localized services which can, in turn, lead to greater network efficiency and likely better user experience. However the local termination needs to be very selective and it should be based on the user profile and other criteria only known to the core network. The set of criteria whether to terminate the data plane locally will depend on the user's subscription services, their service plan, billing status and other factors that are only known in the packet core. Therefore the decision to locally terminate the data path cannot be made at the potential local termination point because the local termination point is unable to make unilateral decision linked to the user's profile.
Furthermore, for the locally serviced traffic it is essential that the mobile packet core functions such as billing are still applied to the locally terminated traffic. Typical 3GPP network mechanism do not allow for this selective data path handling while still supporting mobile packet core services. The localized data path handling is required in the environments where there are suitable resources in the RAN to allow to localized content and service delivery. It remains a challenge to implement a solution to the problem in a practical and efficient manner so that the existing mobile packet core deployments are not disrupted.